Activist captures truth about factory farming

Factory farming is quite possibly the most horrific and destructive practice we humans engage in today. It sacrifices billions of lives each year and serves to pollute, not protect, the environment of our planet. According to the animal rights group, Last Chance for Animals, “97% of the 10 billion animals tortured and killed each year are [factory] farm animals.” So why is it that when most people look at their plates they don’t see the real story behind what they’re eating?

Pollution and Environmental Damage

Let’s take a look at a video published by Factory Farm Drones about a man who infiltrated factory farm territory with a surveillance drone. In the video, you see a glimpse of how devastating factory farming can be on the environment as well as on neighboring communities who happen to be down-wind of one of these facilities.

“The waste falls through the floors [and] it’s flushed out into an open-pit like a cess pool. It’s easy for a big hog operation to have as much waste as a medium-sized city. Of course the pit will fill up so it has to be emptied and they’re emptied by spraying the liquid waste…and that can drift down-wind into the neighboring communities.” says Steve Wing, PhD, Associate professor of Epidomology at the Gillings School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina.

The city of Salem, Oregon had a 2009 population of approximately 156,690 people (that’s about a fourth of the population of Portland Oregon, Denver Colorado or Seattle) and produced 90,817.68 tonnes of waste, all things included. In North Carolina alone, there are over 2000 of these factories, and tens of thousands of tons of waste being sprayed into the air each year.

Steve Wing also states that low-income and colored people are the ones who often fall victim to this unsightly practice. A local who was interviewed for the video claimed that their family would close all the doors and windows whenever the spray came near their home and that they experienced headaches and gagging. Steve also claims that there are numerous studies linking these factories to asthma, especially in children.

Animal Welfare

These are not happy animals. Like any industry, factory farming is about maximizing profits while cutting costs. Unfortunately this equation doesn’t include the welfare of the animals involved. Most are trapped in small cages in which they can barely move, if at all. In fact, each full-grown chicken in a factory farm has only six-tenths of a square foot of space. The chickens will often become aggressive and peck or even eat each other. This has led to an extremely painful practice called de-beaking, which are literally cut off near the time of birth. That is, the chicks that aren’t ground up alive in “chick shredding”.

Unfortunately, other factory farmed animals do not have it any easier than chicks and chickens. According to the Independent about 88 percent of pigs had all or part of their tails cut off from a practice called “tail docking”. This is done as as result of overcrowding, where just like chickens, hogs will become aggressive and bite each others tails. In other words, the reason is “less tail injuries”, but we’re talking about cutting off a body part. It’s hard to imagine a worse injury than that.

Antibiotics and Public Health

Factory farmed animals are typically given too many antibiotics resulting in the animals developing immunity to the antibiotics, and helping to push us closer to the end of the antibiotic era. However, these antibiotics are not only used on the animals to treat infections, but also to promote unnatural growth in the animals. This is a problem because these antibiotic-resistant bacteria can spread from animals to humans via food and contaminated waste in the environment. The result is a bacteria that takes ever-increasing amounts of antibiotics to kill. Many people can not handle these high doses of antibiotics, especially children, the elderly, pregnant women and people with current ailments.